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Sunday, 7 April 2013

Short-term, applied research won't win Canada any Nobel prizes by David Naylor, President of the University of Toronto

A
good read: Short-term, applied research won't win Canada any Nobel
prizes by David Naylor, President of the University of Toronto: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/short-term-applied-research-wont-win-canada-any-nobel-prizes/article10367360/?utmsource=enews
"There’s a popular myth about universities as ivory towers full of
fat-cat academics and loopy students asking unanswerable questions.
Their willful irrelevance is a waste of taxpayers’ money, so the critics
say; get them out of the public trough and doing things Canadian
business can really use. I call it a Zombie idea. It’s dangerous,
because it has infected some decision-makers. And it’s hard to kill,
because there is some truth, and therefore some life in it. On this
latter point, recall that federal and provincial governments sharply
increased their spending on research starting in the 1990s. We owe a
debt to the university leaders who advocated for those increases. But,
in making the case, they expected an economic bonanza – just a hop and a
skip from the lab bench to new multinational superstar companies.
Everyone forgot that the private sector – not universities – ultimately
drives commercialization. Failure to meet those expectations has helped
feed the research Zombie, increasing the clamour for applied research
with a short-term orientation. In fact this Zombie has already had
an effect on research funding. The data in the first accompanying graph,
Fettered and Unfettered Research, show the funding patterns for the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada over the
last 30 years. You can see the pronounced trend. Converting the
proportions into real dollars, about $230-million of federal funding has
moved from unfettered to fettered research at the University of Toronto
over the past five years alone, roughly consistent with a pattern
stretching back almost a generation. In other words, we are already
engaged with partners. We are already engaged in match-funded,
industry-facing research with an applied orientation. This is a national
trend, driven by funding decisions over many years. But did anyone
notice that our innovation and competitiveness indicators improved over
this period? I didn’t. In fact, the real problem was never the type of
research that universities were doing – we had the wrong diagnosis, and
the wrong prescription. It was business-related R&D spending that
lagged, which is why the Jenkins Panel (on which I was privileged to
serve) was convened by the Minister of State for Science and Technology,
to examine how to stimulate business spending on innovation. This
funding ecosystem, combined with many disincentives to excellence, makes
it harder for us to reach the top tier of the podium. Perhaps this is
why Canada has had no home-grown Nobel laureates for 20 years. The
research Zombie masters would have you believe that it doesn’t matter.
Nobel, Schnobel – let’s level down in the best Canadian tradition and go
for the bronze. But there are very good reasons why great basic,
disruptive, fundamental research matters. The first is that the
success of home-grown Nobel laureates – not imports – raises aspirations
for everyone. Their scholarship inspires and attracts others to follow.
Put another way, a country where world-shaking discoveries are made
routinely is a country that will always be able to compete by attracting
the best and brightest to its shores. The second is that great
scholars doing fundamental research are often inspiring teachers. Ray
Jawardhana, for example, is a star-gazer, hunting for Earth-like
planets. What’s the value of that? You can’t turn that into a product or
service tomorrow. But Professor Jawardhana’s work raises fundamental
questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos. He and countless other
colleagues spend their lives asking questions that stretch young minds
and change expectations. We want – and we need – a generation of young
Canadians for whom the sky itself is not the limit. And here is a
third reason why serious fundamental research matters. In my field,
medical research, countless discoveries with no immediate application
turned out to be the foundations for life-changing and live-saving
innovations in clinical care. You can’t predict this in advance. We need
to remember that the distinction between fundamental and applied
research is misleading. As Nobel laureate Sir George Porter famously
pointed out, there is applied research and yet-to-be-applied research.
Geoffrey Hinton’s research into machine learning algorithms and deep
neural networks is a brilliant case in point. It has led to unexpected
advances in computer vision, speech-recognition, data mining, and –
astonishingly – real-time language translation that is now used by
Google and Microsoft. There is another facet here. One needs
excellence in research and scholarship across disciplines because no one
can predict how disciplines will collide. So much of the best
innovation is convergent. Here is just one fascinating example.
Lorna MacDonald teaches performance, opera, and vocal pedagogy in U of
T’s Faculty of Music – a very strong program, internationally renowned.
At the same time, Professor MacDonald collaborates with the clinicians
at the Hospital for Sick Children on cochlear implants, laryngology,
speech-language pathology, and pediatric voice and hearing care. In
closing, I offer both a warning and a note of optimism. First, the
warning. The second graphic, Measuring Up in Global Rankings, presents
composites of rankings across multiple league tables involving Canada’s
research-intensive universities. The data suggest that not enough of
our best research universities are figuring strongly on the world
stage. And some of them are at serious risk of losing ground. In one
jurisdiction after another – China, Brazil, Singapore, France, Germany,
the U.S. and the U.K. – major targeted investments have been made to
ensure that the strongest research universities are able to compete
globally. Earlier this month, the Times Higher Education group
released their rankings of university reputations. These results are
based on a survey of thousands of professors worldwide. McGill and the
University of British Columbia went from 31st from 25th place. Toronto
held steady at 16th. (The third graphic, Canadian Universities in World
Rankings, shows these comparative rankings) Let me share the warning
from Phil Baty, the editor of the Times Higher Education rankings and a
veteran observer of universities worldwide. Mr. Baty said that the
decline was a direct result of Canada’s “highly egalitarian approach.”
He put it precisely: “Countries around the world are picking winners and
investing heavily in them, so they are coming up the ranks while Canada
is slipping.” Sobering as it is, Mr. Baty’s concise formulation
does not address what for me is the most important asset of all – and
the asset that will be devalued the most if the Zombies win. I am
referring, of course, to young talent. The resources that matter most
aren’t in the ground or offshore. The resources that will win the day
for Canada are the inquiring, agile, and creative minds of the next
generation. I continue to believe that, given the right education
and opportunities, with a full suite of institutions with different
missions, including research universities that can compete on the global
stage, the next generation of Canadians will make great discoveries,
develop transformative technologies, imagine more successful societies,
ask hard questions, and lead with verve and vision. I also have faith
that, in the years ahead, if we make the right choices, the Zombies will
disappear – and our young people will secure a bright future for this
great country. David Naylor is the president of the University of
Toronto. This article is abridged from a speech to the Empire Club
earlier this month."

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Welcome to the Future of Neutron Scattering in Canada
a grassroots, nonpartisan movement of ordinary Canadians
that emerged in response to the lack of commitment by federal government(s) to build a new research reactor in Canada for nearly 2 decades.